I’m in my ninth year of this adventure of painting!
I have always enjoyed the potential ambiguity of visual language – it’s what I also enjoy about writing poetry, allowing words and phrases to have multiple meanings. This is the opposite of the way I approach my academic writing and teaching, wanting to be as clear as possible – developing whole papers or lectures from the careful definition and combination of concepts. I don’t want my painting to give the viewer a set of answers; hence my love of non-objective visual statements, and the very name and primary feature of The Impossibility of Knowing series.
However much I enjoy the subjective nature of this work, subjective work raises questions of its origin – from my mind? my feelings? my unconscious reactions? I often ask myself two somewhat related questions, which I find relatedly difficult to answer: What are my sources of inspiration from past and contemporary visual artists? What is “Black art”? My visual vocabulary and the sensations I want to express are the results of so many influences – any of the natural or artistic images I’ve seen, the English in which I think, speak, and write, my experiences as a dark-skinned person in the United States, my feelings as a gay man, my training as a social scientist.
I’ll continue to write more about this, and to be more aware of how these influences manifest themselves in my work.